Greil Marcus

1. ANDREAS AMMER & FM EINHEIT

   Radio Inferno (EGO/Rough Trade, Eickeler Str. 25, 44651 Herne, Germany, fax Germany [23251] 697-222). This astonishing radio play was written by Ammer, produced by Herbert Kapfer, and aired last year in Munich on Bayerischer Rundfunk. Here it’s a single 34-track CD: Dante’s Inferno, cantos I through XXXIV, recast in German, English, and Latin, with all time scrambled. Apt musical composition combines with inspired sampling (a hit of the Temptations’ “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” gongs and hells in a background so deep the sounds don’t seem to be coming from your speakers) and an even more inspired cast: Blixa Bargeld as Dante; Phil Minton as Virgil, his guide; Yvonne Ducksworth as Beatrice (“and characters from hell”); and John Peel, the great BBC dj, as your guide, the voice of authority, the man with the microphone, sardonic, entertaining, professional, surprised by nothing, so cool ice wouldn’t melt in his mouth no matter what circle of hell he’s covering.

   It’s an insane conceit, a shadow play with the 20th century plunged into the 14th and then locked up. Peel: “The surrender to sin leads, by degradation, to solitary self-indulgence. Here, beatnik Burroughs has to read his own book, for all eternity.” John Cage and Marcel Duchamp call out in their own voices; soon enough all are possessed by the spirit of Bosch, laughing at the tenth circle, which is filled with the Falsifiers, the Modern artists “stricken by hideous diseases,” the Dadaists “covered in ulcers.” “Welcome to the Terrordome,” Peel announces with utter contempt. “We’re coming to the countdown to Hell, our Eternal Hit Parade of Sin and Punishment—” It’s funny at first. At the end, too. Strange things happen on the way.

2. TARA KEY

   Bourbon County (Homestead), & FUNKADELIC: “Maggot Brain,” on Maggot Brain (Westbound reissue, 1971). Key has been an effective lead guitarist for well over a decade, first with Louisville’s Babylon Dance Band (not a name to leave behind), then with Antietam. Six or seven cuts into her first solo disc she lets loose with a twisting, uncertain exploration of heretofore hidden passages in her music, as if the likes of “V.O.B.” were her Mammoth Cave and her guitar both torchlight and pickaxe, as if her terrain didn’t exist until she opened it up. It’s a thrilling, mysterious kind of tension she creates—the tension of self-discovery, so many years on. Twenty-three years ago the late Eddie Hazel, guitarist of Funkadelic, went farther without, so to speak, leaving his room, almost without moving. “Maggot Brain” begins where Peter Green’s 1967 “Supernatural” left off, meandering slowly, always more slowly, over ten perfect minutes, toward a peace beyond words. Guess that’s why the original Maggot Brain liner notes, crypto-Nazi cultspeak from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, are included with the new CD—just in case you get too confident, you know?

3. FUNKADELIC

   “Maggot Brain,” on Maggot Brain (Westbound reissue, 1971), & TARA KEY: Bourbon County (Homestead). Key has been an effective lead guitarist for well over a decade, first with Louisville’s Babylon Dance Band (not a name to leave behind), then with Antietam. Six or seven cuts into her first solo disc she lets loose with a twisting, uncertain exploration of heretofore hidden passages in her music, as if the likes of “V.O.B.” were her Mammoth Cave and her guitar both torchlight and pickaxe, as if her terrain didn’t exist until she opened it up. It’s a thrilling, mysterious kind of tension she creates—the tension of self-discovery, so many years on. Twenty-three years ago the late Eddie Hazel, guitarist of Funkadelic, went farther without, so to speak, leaving his room, almost without moving. “Maggot Brain” begins where Peter Green’s 1967 “Supernatural” left off, meandering slowly, always more slowly, over ten perfect minutes, toward a peace beyond words. Guess that’s why the original Maggot Brain liner notes, crypto-Nazi cultspeak from the Process Church of the Final Judgment, are included with the new CD—just in case you get too confident, you know?

4. JANIS JOPLIN

   “Coo Coo,” from Janis (Columbia/Legacy 3-CD reissue, 1966). “We Americans are all cuckoos,—we make our homes in the nests of other birds,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1872, and no one who has recorded this scary Appalachian ballad ever got more homelessness out of it than Joplin did. The leap she takes coming off the second line of each verse—a wail that’s part abandonment to desire, half abandonment to death—was the promise her music, and her myth, almost always made, a promise she could almost never keep when tape was running.

5. MUDBOY & THE NEUTRONS

   “Land of 1000 Shotguns,” from Negro Streets at Dawn (New Rose, 99 rue du Cherche midi, 75006 Paris, France). When this tune started life, as “Land of 1000 Dances,” the Apache Dance was probably not one of those writer Chris Kenner had in mind. These days, on certain Negro streets, it may be the only one left.

6. KRISTIN HERSH

   “Cuckoo,” from Hips and Makers (4 AD). Wordsworth, 1804: “shall I call thee Bird, Or but a wandering Voice?” Why not a spell?

7. COUP

   Kill My Landlord (Wild Pitch/EMI). This non-gangsta Oakland rap trio—Boots, E Roc, Pam the Funkstress—is determinedly local. They don’t care if when they mention “Moby D.” you don’t know they’re referring to the Alameda County courthouse. They’re conversationalists, not braggarts; moody, not melodramatic. But they play with irony both as a weapon and for fun. It’s unnerving to realize the old Vietnam War chant “Hey, hey, how many kids did you kill today?” now refers not to LBJ but to a neighborhood shooter. And it’s hilarious when a white reporter calls Boots for a comment on L.A.’s “tragic riots”: “Not a riot, a rebellion,” Boots snaps. “Well,” says the reporter, “the, uh, tragic rebellion. . . .”

8. LISA REBECCA GUBERNICK

   Get Hot or Go Home—Trisha Yearwood: The Making of a Nashville Star (Morrow, $20). A solid account of a newcomer’s attempt to turn a successful debut album into a career. Gubernick, a Forbes editor, plays fly on the wall with barely a hint of condescension or cynicism, but her story could have used a bit more of the latter. The people in her pages are theme-park nice, and not unbelievably so; the goals they struggle for so efficiently, with such a clear sense of what the rules are, seem benign, pinched, and wholly self-referential. Gubernick’s description of Nashville’s Fan Fair, where stars sit in booths for five days signing autographs, as a “country-music petting zoo” stands out—for once, Lisa the fly turns hack into a human being. The line strikes a discord, and it makes you wonder: did the presence of a New York reporter throughout the conception and recording of Yearwood’s second album have no effect at all on the way the principals thought, spoke, acted?

9. JIM POLLACK, NAIROBI SAILCAT, CARRIE WEILAND

   Slide to the Rhythm (Fitness Innovations/Dynamix Music Services, 711 W. 40th, #428, Baltimore, MD 21211). An aerobics tape, 126 B.P.M., with every other of the 12 tracks building off a riff so suggestive, so determined, you can’t think about anything but the rhythmic truth it’s about to reveal before the following track sweeps it away.

10. BETSY BOWDEN

    English 393, fall 1993 (Rutgers at Camden). Bowden, a Chaucer scholar who describes herself as “world famous among a very tiny group of people who truly care about obscene puns in 12th-century Latin,” invented a Literature of Travel course to assuage her guilt over making full professor. Starting in 400 B.C. with Xenophon’s Anabasis, she covered, among other highlights, The Canterbury Tales, Piers Plowman, Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels, Twain’s Innocents Abroad, and Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies and The Grapes of Wrath, all arranged “such that the whole of Western literary culture culminates in Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited.” “On the last day of class, thus,” Bowden wrote to friends last Christmas, “I was teaching the Nun’s Priest Tale and ’Desolation Row,’ and watching the Medieval Lit class put on the Second Shepherd’s Play in Middle English. I more or less feel as if this is what I ought to be doing when I grow up.”